Columnist Nat Hentoff dies at 91

NEW YORK -- Nat Hentoff, an eclectic columnist, critic, novelist and agitator dedicated to music, free expression and defying the party line, died Saturday at age 91.

His son, Tom Hentoff, said his father died from natural causes at his Manhattan apartment.

Schooled in the classics and the stories he heard from Duke Ellington and other jazz greats, Nat Hentoff enjoyed a diverse and iconoclastic career, basking in "the freedom to be infuriating on a myriad of subjects."

He was a bearded, scholarly figure, a kind of secular rabbi, as likely to write a column about fiddler Bob Wills as a dissection of the Patriot Act, to have his name appear in the liberal Village Voice as the far-right WorldNetDaily.com, where his column last appeared in August.

Ellington, Charlie Parker, Malcolm X and I.F. Stone were among his friends and acquaintances. He wrote liner notes for records by Aretha Franklin, Max Roach and Ray Charles and was the first non-musician named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment of the Arts.

He also received honors from the American Bar Association, National Press Foundation, and -- because of his opposition to abortion -- the Human Life Foundation.

Hentoff's steadiest job was with the Voice, where he worked for 50 years and wrote a popular column.

He wrote for years about jazz for DownBeat and had a music column for the Wall Street Journal.

His more than 25 books included works on jazz and the First Amendment, the novels "Call the Keeper" and "Blues for Charles Darwin" and the memoirs "Boston Boy" and "Speaking Freely."

The documentary "The Pleasures of Being Out of Step: Notes on the Life of Nat Hentoff" was released in 2014.

Jazz was his first love, but Hentoff was an early admirer of Bob Dylan, first hearing the then-unknown singer at a Greenwich Village club in 1961 and getting on well enough with him to write liner notes two years later for Dylan's landmark second album, "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan."

"The irrepressible reality of Bob Dylan is a compound of spontaneity, candor, slicing wit and an uncommonly perceptive eye and ear for the way many of us constrict our capacity for living while a few of us don't," Hentoff wrote.

At a time when the media treated Dylan like a prophet or the latest teen fad, Hentoff asked well-informed questions that were (usually) answered in kind by the cryptic star.

Hentoff also was willing to be Dylan's partner in improvisation.

A 1966 Playboy interview, he later revealed, had been made up from scratch after Dylan rejected the first conversation that was supposed to be published by the magazine.